Traditionally, advertisers purchase advertisement (“ad”) time during upfronts, a time of year when advertisers can purchase airtime to air television ads, referred to as television programming inventory, on television networks and television programming delivered online during a television program broadcasts. Example television ads include commercials that are aired during a program break, transparent overlays that are aired during a program, and text banners that are aired during a program. Companies gather to present their fall lineups and pitch marketers for advertising dollars. Whatever television programming inventory hasn't been sold is then subsequently sold in what is called the scatter market.
While this traditional television programming inventory buying and selling model has worked for decades, it's not without its inefficiencies. Chief among them is the fact that many of the interactions that occur are manual: requests for proposals, insertion orders, ad trafficking, and endless emails and spreadsheets.
In recent years, programmatic advertising has emerged to address these inefficiencies. Programmatic advertising encompasses an array of technologies that automate the buying, placement and optimization of television programming inventory for an ad campaign, in turn replacing human-based methods. In this process, supply-and-demand partners utilize automated systems and business rules to place ads in electronically targeted television programming inventory and generate an ad campaign.
To target television programming inventory, rating estimates of broadcast programs associated with the ad slots are used to generate the ad campaigns. Typically, the ad campaigns are generated well in advance of the airtime, wherein the true value of the airtime placement of the ad is not realized if the ratings estimate is inaccurate, or if the ad that is aired is not relevant in the context of the television program and/or audience. For example, inferior contextual quality of the ad slots may cause the accounting of impressions, the number of homes or individuals exposed to an advertisement or group of advertisements, to be disproportionally high in the day and low at night. The true value of the ad slots would not be realized because of the disproportional accounting of impressions. Additionally, the limited amount of ad slots available for a particular campaign could result in limited reach and/or high frequency of ads delivered to the same viewer which may potentially reduce the effectiveness of the advertising.
Due to these limitations of the programmatic advertising, rates for programmatic advertising are viewed as higher than traditional TV ratings for comparable ad campaigns, without taking into consideration the value of data rich targeting and campaign optimization. Thus, a need exists for a method and system for providing an easy-to-use online platform that allows advertisers to use third party data sets to plan, buy, traffic, track and report on ad campaigns targeted at specific audiences in their local markets